In late February, Modern Wisdom host Chris Williamson released Episode 1064 with Dr. Dani Sulikowski, an evolutionary psychologist whose research focuses on female intrasexual competition — the suite of behaviors women use to compete with each other for romantic and reproductive success. It is one of the most talked-about episodes the show has produced in a while, and the conversation it sparked among women online has been striking. Some women found it validating. Some found it uncomfortable. A meaningful number found it both at once.
A quick note before we go further: the podcast contains some profanity that many of our readers would find inappropriate, and we are not sending you in unprepared. If you can tolerate some rough edges, the science Dr. Sulikowski presents is worth your time. You can find it by searching for "Modern Wisdom 1064" on YouTube, wherever you listen to podcasts, or click here. If the language is a dealbreaker, what follows covers the parts that matter most for your life.
The central finding — the thing that has been bouncing around in our heads since we listened — is what Dr. Sulikowski calls the brake pedal. The idea is simple and, once you hear it, very hard to un-hear. Men in competition mostly try to win by getting better, going faster, doing more. Women in competition do that too, but they also have a second tool: slowing everyone else down. Subtly steering rivals away from good decisions. Making sure the new attractive woman in the room feels unwelcome. Giving the friend advice that sounds helpful but quietly keeps her out of the running.
The research behind this is not a thought experiment. Dr. Sulikowski has run formal studies showing that women consistently advise other women to delay relationships, hold off on commitment, and prioritize independence — at measurably higher rates than they apply that same advice to their own lives. The asymmetry is real and it is documented.
Scott and Laurie listened to all of it, and then they thought about your ward. And your Facebook group. And maybe your own inner voice.
The Game You Never Knew You Were Playing
Scott
Let me start with what the brake pedal actually looks like in practice, because it is not always what you picture when you hear the word "competition."
Male competition tends to be visible. Two guys in a room both want the same thing, and you can usually see them going for it. Female competition is different. Dr. Sulikowski's research describes it as relational aggression — working through social networks rather than direct confrontation. It looks like concern. It sounds like advice. It shows up as a quiet comment to a mutual friend, a question mark placed next to someone's reputation, a warm and well-meaning conversation that somehow leaves you feeling a little less sure of yourself than when it started.
The research also shows it is largely unconscious. Most women doing this have no idea they are doing it. There is no villain in the room. There is just a behavioral system that evolved over thousands of generations because it worked, running quietly underneath a lot of interactions that feel perfectly normal on the surface.
That is actually the most important thing to absorb before you read any further. This is not an indictment of women. It is an explanation of a pattern. And patterns, once you can see them, stop having the same power over you.
Laurie
What I want to add to that — and I want to say this clearly, because it matters — is that every woman reading this has been on the receiving end of this. Every one. You know what it feels like to walk into a room and have the temperature drop. You know what it feels like to get advice that sounded like support but somehow always pointed you away from what you wanted. You have probably also, if you are being honest, given that kind of advice a time or 2.
This is not a comfortable thing to sit with. Dr. Sulikowski says in the podcast that she gets more resistance to her research from men than from women — because women tend to just nod. They know. They have lived it from both sides.
What matters for our audience specifically is not the evolutionary mechanism. What matters is this: if you are a midlife single woman who has been told repeatedly by other women — in your faith community, in online groups, in private conversations — that good men do not exist, that you should wait longer, that your standards need to be higher, that the right person will come along if you just focus on yourself, it is worth asking where that advice is actually coming from. Whether it is actually for you. Whether the women giving it are following it themselves.
When the Competition Wears Sunday Clothes
Laurie
Here is where it gets specifically interesting for people who grew up in LDS or similar faith communities.
The modesty culture that many of us were raised in does something that sounds like it would eliminate this competition dynamic. If women are not allowed to signal physical availability through dress, surely the game stops, right? But that is not what happens. The competition does not disappear. It just changes its currency.
In communities with strict modesty standards, the competitive arena shifts from appearance to worthiness. Who has the most righteous family. Whose husband holds a significant calling. Whose children are serving missions. Whose home always looks like a Relief Society presidency meeting could break out at any moment. Who is perceived as the most celestial version of herself.
The same brake pedal, same tactics, different playing field. The relational aggression does not go away. It just wears a modest neckline.
And when someone steps outside the expected script — when a woman divorces, or simply starts making different choices about how she lives her single life — the response from her community often looks exactly like what Dr. Sulikowski's research predicts. Social distancing. Sudden concern from people who were not especially concerned before. Reputation management through quiet channels. The "bless her heart" move, which Dr. Sulikowski specifically names in the podcast: the act of telling a mutual friend something damaging about a woman while framing it entirely as worry.
If that sounds familiar, it should. It is one of the most practiced social arts in tight-knit faith communities.
Scott
I want to name something that deserves to be said plainly, because we have heard versions of this story more times than we can count.
A woman becomes single — whether through divorce, or simply because she has never married — and something shifts in how her ward receives her. The married women are polite. Friendly, even. But there is a warmth that does not fully extend. She gets included in some things but quietly not others. She senses a kind of invisible management happening around her that she cannot quite put words to. For divorced women, it is sometimes sharper still — people she considered genuine friends for years suddenly seem to find reasons to keep a little more distance.
Women who move into a new ward as singles often describe the same thing. You show up. You are welcomed in the official sense. And yet you spend the next several months feeling like you are pressing your face against a window that everyone is too kind to acknowledge is there.
Dr. Sulikowski's research suggests this is not paranoia and it is not a coincidence. It maps directly onto the competitive suppression pattern. An unattached woman in a community organized almost entirely around married couples is, by her very presence, a signal the other women in the room register — whether they mean to or not. She is available. And availability, in that context, reads as a kind of ambient competition.
The response from married women — the subtle calibration of warmth, the quiet perimeter, the concern that sounds caring but functions as distance — is the brake pedal running exactly as designed. Not maliciously. Not even consciously, most of the time. But running.
And for every single woman who has ever walked into a ward and felt the room subtly reorganize itself around her, or who watched her friendships quietly shift after her marriage ended — this is worth knowing. It was not entirely about you. It was partly about what you represent in that room.
The Advice That Was Never For You
Laurie
This is the part I want to push hardest on, because I think it is the most actionable.
Dr. Sulikowski's formal research shows that women recommend more reproductively inhibiting paths to other women than they would choose for themselves. Wait longer before committing. Focus on your career first. You deserve better — meaning, do not settle for what is in front of you right now. These are not necessarily bad pieces of advice in isolation. But when they are given consistently, in every direction, to every woman who is close to making a real connection, they start to function as something else.
Look at your Facebook group. Look at the threads where a woman shares that she is thinking about giving a man a real chance and the comment section fills up with caution and qualifications. Look at how quickly "you deserve better" appears. Look at how rarely the comments say "that sounds promising, take the chance."
I am not saying every cautionary comment is competitive sabotage. Some of it is genuine care. Some of it is projection from people's own bad experiences. But some of it — and I want you to really sit with this — is the brake pedal. And you cannot always tell which is which from the outside.
The question worth asking, especially when you receive advice that consistently steers you away from connection, is this: is this person doing in her own life what she is recommending to me? If the answer is no, that is worth knowing. Not to dismiss her entirely. But to weight the advice accordingly.
What Men Missed, and Why
Scott
One more thing that the podcast makes clear and that I want to say to the men reading this.
You missed almost all of this. Not because you were checked out. Because the game was never played in a register you could detect. Dr. Sulikowski points out that men almost never receive this kind of treatment and are therefore genuinely blind to how constant it is for women. You could be standing in a room where 4 different competitive exchanges are happening simultaneously and you would notice exactly none of them.
This matters for midlife dating because a lot of men are still carrying confusion about what happened in their social world during their marriage, during their divorce, in their ward, in their friend groups. Things shifted in ways you could not explain. People you expected to show up did not. The social landscape changed and you could not quite track how.
Some of what you missed was this. Not all of it. But some of it.
The useful response to that is not resentment. It is just better calibration going forward. Understanding that the social world women navigate is operating at a level of complexity most men genuinely cannot perceive is not an excuse for anything. It is just accurate.
What to Do With All of This
Laurie
I am not going to pretend this is easy to hear. If you are a woman, you may be feeling some version of: I am not like that. Or: I have been on the receiving end of this, not the giving end. Both of those things may be true. Both of those things may also be incomplete.
What Dr. Sulikowski is describing is not a character flaw. It is a behavioral system so deeply embedded in how women have evolved to navigate social life that most of it runs entirely below conscious awareness. You did not choose to have a brake pedal. But you have one. So does the woman who gave you that advice 3 years ago that sounded like she had your best interests at heart.
What you do with that awareness is up to you.
You can start to notice when the advice you are receiving is actually for you and when it is functioning as something else. You can start to notice when your own internal voice — the one that always finds a problem with a promising person, the one that keeps raising the bar just as someone gets close to clearing it — might be running a program that is not serving your actual interests.
And you can decide, deliberately and on purpose, to be the woman in the room who actually wants to see other women win. Who says "that sounds worth pursuing" when it is. Who gives the advice she would give her own daughter. Who does not use the brake pedal, even when she could.
That is not naivety. That is a choice. And it is one of the more radical things you can do in a culture that has been training women to slow each other down for a very long time.
You are allowed to want connection. You are allowed to take the chance. You are allowed to stop listening to the voice — inside or outside of you — that keeps saying not yet.
And when you are ready to go deeper, we will be here.
— Scott & Laurie
Weighing in from the lowest tier of the Celestial Kingdom, where we finally figured out that some of the voices telling us to wait were never waiting themselves.